Joe Rosenblatt was one of the most disturbing and exciting voices in new Canadian poetry when Toronto’s pioneering Coach House press published his The LSD Leacock in 1966.

Now 86, the poet, novelist and visual artist lives and works on Vancouver Island. Despite his venerable age and idyllic residence, Rosenblatt has not noticeably mellowed. He continues to return from deep dives into his surreal and chaotic inner life and from keen-eyed expeditions into the natural world outside his Qualicum Beach residence with vivid images and thoughtful reflections on the nature of poetry, the nature of hunger and the multi-tentacled nature of desire.

Bite Me is a book of poetry and prose that explores the author’s obsessions with undersea life forms (particularly life forms with beaks and tentacles — the squid and the octopus preside over much of this haunting work like dark, hungry gods) birds, flesh-eating flowers, and cats as serial killers. His sure, steady authorial voice and his courageous willingness to look into the luminous darkness at the centre of the human heart make this difficult material into a compelling beauty.

“I perceive the imagination as a bulbous flower that is always in need of nourishment, a carnivorous nibbler forcing me as a poet to continually search for nutrients to satisfy its insatiable appetite,” he writes, and this book is a tribute to his continual search, and the startling images and disturbing line drawings he brings back from that quest.

In a perceptive 2015 essay on Rosenblatt, George Bowering says that his friend Rosenblatt was “mentored” by Al Purdy, Milton Acorn, and Earle Birney but places the word inside scare quotes, indicating his implicit judgment that Rosenblatt does not have the same relationship to reality as the three supposed mentors. Rosenblatt, Bowering says, once wrote “The very idea of reality gives me the hives.”

Rosenblatt celebrates his own oblique and surreal connection to reality on every page of this marvelous book. He can wax tender in a poem about the death of his wife and within a few pages muse about the appeals of self-cannibalism and his curiosity about how his own flesh might taste. What remains constant throughout the tonal shifts and sometimes-nightmarish imagery is the poet’s restless and penetrating mind, chewing away on a refractory world and turning it into beauty.

Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. Like Joe Rosenblatt, he is fascinated by hunger and desire. He welcomes you feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net